Just a month before Floyd’s death, a Pew Research Center survey found that 78% of Americans overall – but a far smaller share of black Americans (56%) – said they had at least a fair amount of confidence in police officers to act in the best interests of the public. By contrast, large majorities of white (84%) and Hispanic (74%) adults expressed at least a fair amount of confidence. These views – and the wide racial and ethnic gap in opinions – had changed little over the prior few years. Read More →

Black Americans, a group that has been hit disproportionately hard by the coronavirus outbreak, have been paying closer attention to many elements of the outbreak – and discussing it more frequently with other people – than other U.S. adults, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted before nationwide protests began over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

But black adults were much more likely than whites and somewhat more likely than Hispanic adults to frequently discuss the COVID-19 outbreak with other people. Roughly a quarter (26%) of black adults said they discuss it almost all the time, more than twice the 10% of white adults who said the same, and more than the 19% of Hispanic adults who said the same.

At Pew Research Center, we collect and analyze data in a variety of ways. Besides asking people what they think through surveys, we also regularly study things like images, videos and even the text of religious sermons.

In a digital world full of ever-expanding datasets like these, it’s not always possible for humans to analyze such vast troves of information themselves. That’s why our researchers have increasingly made use of a method called machine learning. Broadly speaking, machine learning uses computer programs to identify patterns across thousands or even millions of data points. In many ways, these techniques automate tasks that researchers have done by hand for years. Read More →

Black Americans have been hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak, accounting for a disproportionate share of COVID-19 deaths. At the same time, they stand out from other racial and ethnic groups in their attitudes toward key health care questions associated with the outbreak. In particular, black adults are more hesitant to trust medical scientists, embrace the use of experimental medical treatments and sign up for a potential vaccine to combat the illness, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Nationally, black Americans account for about 13% of the U.S. population but 24% of the coronavirus deaths for which racial or ethnic information was available as of June 2, according to The COVID Tracking Project.

The disparity is particularly wide in some states. In Kansas and Wisconsin, black people account for 6% of each state’s population but 29% and 26% of deaths, respectively – the biggest proportional disparities out of the states for which demographic data on coronavirus deaths is available. In Missouri, blacks account for 12% of the population but 37% of deaths. In eight states overall, the black share of coronavirus deaths is at least twice as high as the black share of the population.

Public health experts have offered a mix of explanations for these disparities. They include higher rates of preexisting health conditions that increase the risk of complications from the coronavirus; social and economic factors that contribute to health risk; and long-standing inequities in health care access and outcomes for black Americans compared with other racial and ethnic groups.Read More →

A demonstrator holds her hands up while kneeling in front of police at City Hall in Anaheim, California, on June 1, 2020, during a peaceful protest over the death of George Floyd. (Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images)

Days of protests across the United States in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police have brought new attention to questions about police officers’ attitudes toward black Americans, protesters and others. The public’s views of the police, in turn, are also in the spotlight. Here’s a roundup of Pew Research Center survey findings from the past few years about the intersection of race and law enforcement. Read More →

Many Americans are anticipating changes in the global balance of power and the importance of international cooperation even as the coronavirus outbreak continues to rage across the United States and around the world, according to three recent Pew Research Center surveys. Americans are divided in their outlooks, mainly along ideological lines, but are more united on opinions relating to China’s place in the world.

Here are four key findings on how Americans view the reshaping of international relations from surveys of U.S. adults conducted from March to May 2020. Read More →

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office before signing an executive order related to regulating social media on May 28, 2020. (Doug Mills/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump this week signed an executive order aimed at discouraging social media companies from censoring posts. The order follows a decision by Twitter earlier in the week to add fact-checking labels to two of Trump’s tweets, even as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he doesn’t believe internet companies should fact-check political speech.

Amid the back-and-forth between Twitter and perhaps its most high-profile user, here are some fast facts about Americans’ attitudes toward social media companies, based on Pew Research Center surveys of U.S. adults fielded before the current controversy. Read More →

Americans’ anxieties about privacy extend to the realm of digital romance. Some 30% of U.S. adults say they have ever used a dating app or site, and among them, a majority (57%) report being either very or somewhat concerned about how much data such services collect about them.

Older online daters tend to be more worried about this type of data collection than their younger counterparts. About half (48%) of online dating users ages 18 to 29 say they are very or somewhat concerned about data collection, while larger majorities of older users express concern. Online dating users 50 and older are especially likely to be “very” concerned about data collection. There are also modest differences by gender among online daters, with women more concerned than men.

Personal experiences with and beliefs about online dating also tie in with people’s concerns about data collection. Groups who are more concerned about data collection include those who have had negative experiences with online dating, those who believe online dating has had a mostly negative impact on dating and relationships, and those who believe privacy violations are very or somewhat common on dating sites or apps.

About three-in-ten U.S. adults (28%) say they are very confident that they would know what steps to take to check the accuracy of news and information about the coronavirus outbreak. A slightly smaller portion (22%) say they are not too or not at all confident, while the largest share – around half (49%) – express some confidence. These findings come from a Pew Research Center survey conducted April 20 to 26 among 10,139 adults who are part of the Center’s American Trends Panel.

Americans’ confidence in checking COVID-19 information aligns closely with their confidence in checking the accuracy of news stories more broadly. In early 2019, 29% of Americans said they were very confident that they would know what steps to take to check the accuracy of news stories (regardless of the specific subject matter), and 24% said they were not too or not at all confident. Again, the largest share (46%) said they were somewhat confident.Read More →

The coronavirus outbreak has taken the lives of nearly 100,000 Americans. Yet since the start of the outbreak, the death toll has been concentrated in a just a few places – mostly large metropolitan areas, especially the New York City area.

The places hit hardest by the coronavirus outbreak – which have relatively large shares of ethnic and racial minorities and residents living in densely populated urban and suburban areas – are almost all represented by congressional Democrats.

A new Pew Research Center analysis of data on official reports of COVID-19 deaths, collected by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, finds that, as of last week, nearly a quarter of all the deaths in the United States attributed to the coronavirus have been in just 12 congressional districts – all located in New York City and represented by Democrats in Congress. Of the more than 92,000 Americans who had died of COVID-19 as of May 20 (the date that the data in this analysis was collected), nearly 75,000 were in Democratic congressional districts.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand how the geographic impact of the coronavirus outbreak corresponds with the political geography of the United States. For this analysis, we relied on official reports of deaths attributed to the novel coronavirus.

This analysis required congressional-district-level estimates of the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19. To generate these estimates, researchers used the available county-level figures (collected and reported by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at John Hopkins University). However, many counties are divided across two or more congressional districts. In cases where a county is divided across multiple congressional districts, the deaths in that county were proportionally assigned to the congressional districts the county falls into based on the share of its population that falls into each district (using the Geocorr tool from the Missouri Census Data Center).

The estimates provided in this report are subject to several sources of error. In addition to the mismatch between county geography and congressional districts, there may be significant differences between the true number of deaths due to COVID-19 and the official reported counts of those deaths. There may also be variation across the states in the quality and types of data reported.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.